Odoo: Best ERP For Wholesale Distribution Companies To Scale In Malaysia
Business workflows in wholesale distribution industries are often complicated.
Although they have diverse operation models, their challenges are more or less the same. For example, poor visibility into the status of customers' orders, poor inventory traceability, and lack of real-time sales reports.
These challenges ultimately interrupt the productivity of supply chain management. Thus, you need to adopt an ERP system like Odoo to beat off these challenges.
Odoo provides an array of features. Odoo's scalability helps wholesale distribution businesses meet the evolving market demands which in turn improves cash flow greatly.
Here, we take a look at how wholesale and distribution businesses like yours can benefit from the Odoo ERP system.
Also read: 5 Essential ERP System Modules for Wholesale Distribution Businesses in 2023
5 Benefits of Implementing Odoo ERP In Wholesale and Distribution Industries
In Malaysia, Odoo is one of the best ERP systems for wholesale and distribution companies to scale effectively. Because Odoo's scalability and flexibility can cater to the unique business nature of wholesale and distribution industries.
Other than scalability and flexibility, what else Odoo ERP solution can benefit wholesale and distribution businesses?
Improve customer relationship management (CRM)
Access real-time inventory management
Full visibility into the customer order status
Automate accounting and financial management
Accurate reporting and forecasting
The image is showing a list of customers to follow up
Improve Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a core strategy for all industries including wholesale distribution to increase customer satisfaction rates.
Here is an excellent tool for you — Odoo’s CRM software to nurture relationships with your current and potential customers effectively.
In Odoo’s CRM, you can pre-schedule a series of follow-up activities per opportunity. You will be notified of which customers you need to call or meet today.
The next follow-up reminders will be triggered automatically once the first action is done.
So, you will never miss a lead or customer to follow up.
While following up with customers, you are also allowed to record the critical information in log notes as a reference. It makes it easier to pick up where you left off in the next follow-up.
With Odoo’s CRM software, you can stay connected with customers to build customer loyalty and increase customer retention, allowing you close more sales.
The image is showing stock move reports
Access Real-time Inventory Management
To ensure business continuity in wholesale distribution companies, you would have to maintain a steady flow and optimal level of stock at all times.
This is why you need powerful inventory management software like Odoo to help your business to acquire real-time stock management.
Odoo’s Inventory software updates inventory data instantly once changes are occurring in other integrated modules, such as Sales, Purchase, and Accounting.
Hence, you can always access accurate, real-time visibility into all warehouse operations anytime such as inventory locations, quantities, valuations, and expiry dates.
By having real-time information at your fingertips, you can always store sufficient inventories level in the warehouse in the good condition to satisfy customer order demand consistently.
Full Visibility Into Customer Orders Status
In the wholeslae distribution sectors, tracking customer order status is crucial to ensure the products are delivered on time and to the right customers.
In Odoo, you can navigate across the different apps to track the status of customer orders from the time the order is placed to the time it is delivered through the fulfillment process.
Odoo gives you full visibility, keeping everyone informed on customer order status. You can understand better when you will receive the products from suppliers, start production upon receiving the product, and ship the product to customers.
Planning for product manufacturing and delivery becomes more insightful to keep the supply chain performance operational.
With full visibility, it is easier to spot and address the issues to avoid any possible delay in product shipment. This helps you to reduce the costs associated with rush orders and delayed shipments greatly.
Automate Accounting and Invoicing Management
Most of the time, wholesale distribution businesses have to spend quality time and resources to deal with a high volume of transactions, including sales, purchases, and invoices.
Automation in Odoo’s Accounting comes in handy to save your time and cost greatly.
You just need to spend a few clicks to complete the repetitive workflows such as bank reconciliation, journal entries, payment processing, tax calculations, and fiscal period closure.
Automation also ensures all data inputs are accurate and up-to-date. It cuts off the unnecessary human-prone error that usually arises from manual data entries.
These complete and detailed financial records will give a clear picture of a company’s financial health and position, allowing senior management to decide where to allocate resources, create accurate budgets, and better forecast future financial performance.
The image is showing a sales report for analysis
Accurate Reporting and Forecasting
Having a sharp eye on key business metrics in the wholesale distribution industries is important to cope with unpredictable market fluctuations.
The built-in Business Intelligence features in Odoo integrate all metrics across different modules into a single platform to ensure a single source of truth.
So, everyone in the company will look at accurate and up-to-date reports.
You can also generate custom reports in seconds to study the criteria you are interested in. All reports can be shown in graphs, pivot tables, or dashboards, allowing you to visualize the patterns, trends, and relationships of data clearly.
By holding reliable data on hand, making a guesmaking a guess is no longer your choice in forecasting.
With accurate reporting, you can gain valuable insight and come out with near-perfect forecasting in terms of inventory demand, market opportunities, and potential bottlenecks.
Essential Odoo Features for Wholesale Distribution Industries
Odoo has a range of features that can make your life easier, from boosting your sales to optimizing your inventory management.
With Odoo by your side, you can take your wholesale distribution business to the next level.
Get ready to discover more Odoo features you need in the wholesale distribution business!
Sales Management:
Quotation template: Auto-populates the details to reduce repetitive data entry and send out a complete quotation in minutes.
Customer portal: Your customers can view their orders and invoices, keeping them up-to-date and engaged.
Pricing and discount management: Manage complex pricing strategies and apply discounts or coupons to orders.
Purchase Management:
Automated reordering: Auto-generate RFQs when certain product drops below the minimum level, avoiding frequent out-of-stock issues.
Call for bid: Compare and contrast the purchase price, delivery lead time, and other factors among the vendors to choose the best deals.
Vendor piece lists: Keep track of all past purchase prices of products as records.
Inventory Management:
Inventory adjustment: Correct discrepancies between the actual quantity of a product in stock and the quantity recorded in your system.
Barcode scanning: Quickly receive and ship products with barcode scanning.
Lot/serial number: Lot/serial number helps you quickly identify which products are affected by a recall and take appropriate action.
Accounting:
Deferred expenses & revenue models: Auto-post your expenses and revenue periodically and accurately.
Invoicing: Issue professional invoices and manage your accounts receivable.
Payment follow-up: Automate payment follow-ups to ensure on-time payments.
Customer Relationship Management:
Lead management: Keep track of leads and convert them into opportunities.
Follow-up management: Schedule a sequence of follow-up activities per opportunity, ensuring you never miss following up with them.
Pipeline management: Gain a clear single view of the opportunity pipeline and move each opportunity across the pipeline with drag-and-drop.
eCommerce:
Website builder: Create a professional-looking website without coding.
Product catalog: Display products in an online catalog with descriptions and images.
Multiple payment gateways: Integrate popular payment gateways to make online transactions seamless.
These are just a few examples of the many Odoo features that can benefit wholesale distribution businesses. I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.
Also, don't forget to check out our bonus read on 18 must-have features of a top-notch warehouse management system!
To win in an unpredictable market and fluctuating demand, Odoo is the best choice of ERP system for wholesale distribution companies in Malaysia to perform better and easier.
Integration and automation in Odoo can strengthen customer relationships, improve product move traceability, gain full visibility into customer order status, automate accounting and financial management, and forecast accurately.
Don’t just take our word for it, experience the power of the Odoo ERP system by yourself! Don’t wait any longer, schedule a demo with us now!